Nodes, AI workflow creation and fields

0:00 what's up everybody in this video we're going to be covering some foundational nadn nodes we're going to be talking about JavaScript object notation commonly abbreviated as Json for short we're going to be talking about different field types in n8n then finally we're going to wrap it all up with how data is represented on this platform and how you can best make use of it without further Ado let's dive into it so if you guys have seen some of the other videos on my channel you'll know that I put a very big emphasis on building things practically I don't really care much for the academic side of things I prefer we just Dive Right In and then teach some of these concepts by actually putting nodes together making workflows that you could sell for business purposes or Implement into your own companies and that's what we're going to be doing today we can't really get away from I'm doing some of the academic stuff with Json just because you know if you don't know JavaScript

0:45 object notation you are going to have to learn some things like types and objects and what variables are and stuff like that but for the most part we're going to be learning all of these Concepts down here by building two workflows the first workflow is up here and essentially what this does is it feeds in a bunch of lead data to artificial intelligence this is the Google sheet containing four leads with a bunch of information here so we're going to feed in this information AI then what we're going to do is we're going to have ai generate a subject line for an email an icebreaker for an email an elevator pitch for an email a call to action and then a postcript little PS sign the idea here is this is a real workflow that people pay me for and so these are the ones that I want to I want to start with um essentially this will allow you to customize email Outreach that it seems as if you've done a lot of research into

1:29 the person uh which is very very valuable in a business setting the second workflow is a little bit more um peculiar I guess there's this service out there called source of sources it used to be called helper reporter ataro basically the way that it works is this lovely gentleman here Peter will send you uh a bunch of information uh basically where journalists are looking for Professionals in a certain industry to weigh in on some developments and then if you're a professional in the industry and you give the journalists some I don't know good info they can actually tag you and then like use you in an article it's quick and easy way to basically get listed in a magazine or some very authoritative data source and what this system does is it basically gets an email like this then it pumps in the titles into AI does some cool processing um and then we actually write

2:14 a draft of that email as if we were an expert in that field which all you need to do is just like quickly review give a once over edit a little bit and then send off to journalists there's another system that I've sold a number of times and so I want the videos that I create on naden to be practical in nature I want them to be on things that you're probably going to be using for business purposes so these are the two systems that uh we're going to be building they're cool systems and all but you know for the purpose of this video I kind of want to build them from scratch so why don't we just exit out of that puppy and then uh oh let me just do one thing actually I'm just going to copy over the prompt here because uh if I don't The Prompt can be kind of annoying to write I don't really want to take up a ton of our time so that's the prompt that we're going to be using for AI and for the rest of this we'll just get rid of that okay the very first concept I want to cover are fixed fields and expression Fields um I'm going to be

2:59 basically convinced ing you to just use Expressions all the time and I'm also going to show you how to map different field inputs cuz the last time that we jumped around naden we built a couple of workflows but I was sort of glancing over a couple of the um like some of the Nuance behind fields and stuff like that so for the purpose of the demonstration it's going to be pretty easy we're just going to um build the first system out by clicking a button that is going to get a bunch of data from our Google sheet and then we're just going to pass all of that data in kind of row by row into AI um pretty simple pretty straightforward but ultimately something that is very useful and you'll find yourself doing quite a bit if you do Outreach so first things first I'm just going to press tab that's going to open up this trigger thing on the left hand side and then you know if you type trigger here it'll be if you type trig I should say you'll see a ton of options here um you could either do that or you can just scroll down to the bottom where it says add another trigger and then

3:43 press trigger manually either is fine but for the purpose of this demo I'm just going to do that and basically what I want to do is the second that I run this trigger when I click on test workflow um I want to uh get all of the rows and all the data in my Google sheet so I'm going to go up here to nodes I'm just going to type in sheet we're going to get Google Sheets now what I'm going to do is if you scroll down here you'll see that there's this one node called get rows in sheets that's what I'm going to click on now I've already done a connection before um what you're going to have to do if you want to connect to your Google Sheets account is go to create new connection now because I'm on the cloud hosted offering and keep in mind if you're not on the cloud hosted offering um these sorts of connections are a little bit more difficult you have to go to Google Cloud console and get set up there but because I'm on the cloud hosted offering all I need to do is Click sign in with Google over here and I'll actually go connect to my email

4:30 account and then it'll create a credential for me which is pretty handy so you can see it's saying it's already has some access just because I've already done this connection but for the purpose of the demo I just wanted to show you guys what that looks like um and then I'm just going to save this connection here with a name so that it's just nice and organized okay and what we want to do is we just want to grab this Google sheet up here right so in NN there a variety of ways um to do this but I'm just going to I'm going to be looking for a document sorry a sheet within a document my bad the document we're going to want to select is from the list we're actually going to go down we're going to choose this one called leads commas space January 27th 2025 as you can see we've already manually found that okay and then the specific sub sheet that we want is this sheet one because I guess that's the

5:15 only one that we have here so I'm just going to click on this it's going to actually do an API call to Google Sheets it's going to find that there's only sheet one here that I can give it a click and then voila let me just run test step and let's see what happens when I click test okay great so I've off fiscated this data this data is not um actually one for one whoever this this person is I've gone through and I've like renamed them and stuff like that just for privacy purposes but as we see on the right hand side here we we have a bunch of output and we can see the output in a variety of ways tabular Json schema most people and N they like the schema look because it just kind of compresses the information nicely it's a little bit easier for them to see I'm a little zoomed in here too um but uh yeah you know normally like you see most of the node variables which is pretty handy but this Json one over over here this is

6:00 really intimidating for a lot of people and so we're going to cover this in detail I'm going to show you exactly how you read Jason what all those things mean um but just I just want you guys to know that for the remainder of this course I'm going to be using primarily the Jason and the schema view but I'm actually going to tend towards Jason and the reason why I'm going to be tending towards Jason is because like Jason says all the same stuff that the schema view does anyway um but unfortunately part of the reasons part of the way you learn Jason is just by kind of staring at it a lot and squinting at it and kind of inherently and intuitively understanding the formatting if we're going to be at outputs all day anyway we might as well kind of get you know kill two birds with one stone all of the same data in Json is represented in schema anyway it's just instead of like the quotes around key names and stuff you just have sort of this light gray box um alongside like a type sign here so I guess the point I'm making is we might as well double up

6:47 and just learn how Jason looks while we're proceeding with the course and that's why I'm going to be using this even if it looks a little bit more intimidating don't worry too much about it okay so I said that I talk about Fields right um so fields in NN just as we're me just as I was covering on in the previous video are stuff like this right we have this sort of Center node config option here for our Google Sheets node um you know one of the fields we selected was this YouTube credential to connect with another one was this resource sheet within document operation document sheet but I want you to know that these are actually all representable in code as well so as you see over here we have two different types of fields one's called fixed and the other's called expression so by default just to keep your life easy and to not like freaky the hell out especially if you're like a Nubian NN

7:34 they're going to keep all the fields to the fixed type but if you click on expression you'll see that things are now a little bit different notice how when I went to fixed we had like a nice little you know it said um leads January 27 2025 and then when I jump over to expression now we have some big long ID so what is this why is it structured that way and what exactly does any of this mean well if we pay close attention this IDE D field here one lowercase o t r r a T4 C Capital C and then the rest of this big long ID string over here if we go to our Google sheet what we'll see is that that ID string actually matches the URL of our Google sheet exactly this takes me to a wider Point most of the time sorry about that most of the time anytime you're accessing a resource on some API or even just on the internet they will store the ID of the resource which is sort of like a hidden representation of it in the URL so you know one of the examples that I provided the other day was I went over to clickup right and inside of clickup I like searched around for some record I'm just going to click on this here this is this was my old content calendar um how to

8:42 send 1,000 cold Instagram DMS per day that was one of the things I wanted to do this right up here is the ID of the record 86b 27A 7zm right if I wanted to do something with this through their API this is the ID of the record that I would be calling so once you know that like clickup uh Monday uh like even Gmail basically every service out there they will store the ID of the thing you want to modify or update or whatever just in the URL so if ever a field asks for an ID you can almost always just go to the URL of the thing on the actual user um you know on the actual app like the user interface then you could find that URL thing you just hardcode it in here okay so that's just a just a brief look at some of the differences between fixed and expression basically fix a lot of the time just to

9:27 to keep you guys um to make sure like we're on the same page here fix is just the simpler version then expression is sort of what's actually going on under the hood so you know um naden just defaults to fix like it just did here because it doesn't really want to scare you away but in order to really unlock the value of NN we have to go to the expression um field and I'm going to show you here why you know I basically